In the midst of ‘The Great Resignation,’ the damage from employees (or contractors) leaving an organization might be one of the greatest risks facing IT teams today. The reality is that in the busy enterprise computing environment, user onboarding and offboarding is a fact of daily life.
When employee counts range into the five-figure territory — and entire networks of contractors have to be accounted for as well — it’s easy to lose track of who’s, literally, coming and going. Oftentimes, there are “offboarding” steps that are forgotten about — disabling or removing the user from Active Directory or IAM is not sufficient as the user may have local credentials on some of the SaaS platforms or other sensitive systems.
Technically speaking, there are ways to automate offboarding using protocols such as SCIM and JIT mapping; however, it requires a high level of maturity in an IT environment and the staff to implement it.
For organizations not implementing SCIM or JIT, offboarded employees may still have local credentials on some of their regularly used SaaS platforms or other sensitive systems. Leaving these users’ access in place exposes organizations to unauthorized data access.
When it comes to taking old users off systems – deprovisioning – there are a few best practices that should be borne in mind and followed.
Best Practices in Deprovisioning
Keep an Inventory — It’s essential that IT teams keep an up-to-date record, at all times, of all users with access to company systems. A channel of communication with human resources should be established for keeping abreast of events impacting the user inventory such as employee terminations. To be effective from a security standpoint, these systems need to be capable of scrutinizing both internal and external users. The vendor landscape can be constantly shifting. Read more:https://bit.ly/3pC7HPr